STATE OF TEXAS - TSL - TALKING BOOK PROGRAM
Moderator: Talking Book Program
September 4, 2012
7:00 pm CT
Shannon: Well we’re very glad to have Joshua Foer with us tonight – he’s the
2006 U.S. Memory Champion. He’s a graduate of Yale and lives in New Haven
where he’s a journalist whose work has been in National Geographic, Esquire,
Slate, The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Nation. "Moon Walking
with Einstein" was an international best seller and translated into 31
languages and it’s his first book and thank you for being here with us
tonight.
Joshua Foer: Thank you so much for having me.
Shannon: Also welcome to our attendees, this is the third meeting of our
Book Club, due to there being 65 RSVPs for tonight, we muted the call so that
everyone can hear better and so we’re not speaking over each other.
So you can hear us but we can’t hear you and at the end of the call we’re
going to un-mute it for a few minutes.
Joshua Foer: Okay.
Shannon: So one of the questions that came up with our patrons from several
people was they wanted to know if there were any specific tips you would have
for people who are interested in training their memory or any specific books
you found most useful.
Joshua Foer: Yes, well, in terms of tips, you know basically everything that
I – all of the sort of memory techniques I talked about in this book are
based around the idea of trying to use your visual memory or your other
senses to elaborate whatever it is that you’re trying to remember.
Basically the more associational hooks you can put in a piece of information,
the easier it’s going to be to assist it back out at a later date. So you
know, one of the things I talk about is this famous paradox in psychology
known as the Baker-Baker Paradox. And see, the idea is this: if you take two
people and you tell them to remember the same word, if you say to one person
-remember that there’s a guy who’s name is Baker, like that’s his last name,
and you tell somebody else to remember that there’s a guy who is a baker,
like that’s a job, and you ask them at a later date to recall the word that
you told them – the person who was told his name is Baker is going to have
less good memory of that word than the person who was told his job is that
he’s a baker, which is really kind of weird, it’s the same word, and one
person remembered it better than the other person.
And the reason -and it revealed something, I think pretty interesting of how
memory works, is that the name Baker doesn’t actually mean anything to you.
It doesn’t have any sorts of associations that link it to all the other
memories in your brain and your mind. With the common noun baker, you hear
that word [and] you immediately construct an image in your mind’s eye of
somebody with the white hat. You can probably smell some, you know, maybe you
can smell bread. Maybe you remember some other baker that you know, and all
of those associations make that word easier to remember at a later date.
So the trick of remembering stuff better is figuring out how to transform
those capital-B-Bakers into lowercase-b-bakers. How do you take a piece of
information that is not that memorable and add associations to it to make it
easier to find at a later date?
In terms of other books to read, one that I really like is called Your Memory
and it’s written by a BYU Psychologist called Kenneth Higbee and what I liked
about it is, yes there a lot of books who have memory training that are sort
of, well, I don’t know, filled with hyperbole, there are – I feel like
sometimes they oversell what they can really offer you. This is a book that’s
written by a scientist, and it not only explains some of these memory tricks
but it also talks about why and how they worked, and the science behind them,
so I really appreciate that. So that’s the book that I can recommend.
Shannon: Okay. So something else that came up is we had somebody ask: is
everyone a visual rememberer and have there been blind and visually impaired
people who have competed in the memory championship and can you –
Joshua Foer: Not – yes sorry continue.
Shannon: And can you talk about how the visual aspects of memory training
might be translated to a person who is not visually oriented.
Joshua Foer: So I’ll tell you, not only have there been blind people
participating in the U.S. Memory Championship, the last two years – one of
the finalists was a young woman who is blind and had to have all of the -I
guess when they would do some of the events, she actually had to have
somebody [timing?] her, the information that she had to remember, and I mean,
that’s – I thought, pretty remarkable, because she was engaging in quite a
cognitive juggling act, not only having to re-interpret what was being told
to her but then to actually, you know, commit it to memory, and I think this
young woman if she comes back and competes next year, may very well be a
favorite to finish in the top three of the contest, so I think that’s pretty
neat.
Shannon: Yes. Okay, another question we had was if you had heard of any of
these techniques being used with the Alzheimer’s patients to either treat or
combat that illness?
Joshua Foer: Yes, so you know, there has been evidence of using memory
techniques in a sort of compensatory manner, so as kind of like a crutch to help
you remember stuff when you’re, you know, in early stages of Alzheimer’s,
Cognitive Dementia. In terms of these techniques being in any way
restorative or helping to, you know, stop the spread of Alzheimer’s, there’s
absolutely zero evidence of that as far as I know. But the problem with using
these techniques as compensatory that’s always been found is, you know, they
only work if you remember to use them. Memory technique only works if you
force yourself to use the techniques.
And the problem has always been, okay, you know, you can bring a bunch of
people into the lab, send them into an auditorium – tell them, look here is
how you can remember -I don’t know, let’s say your shopping list better,
which is something that everybody, or you know, this is how you can remember
a list of things that you need to do – the to-do-list, better.
The problem is – and once you teach people these techniques they immediately
can remember those kinds of information, they have been taught how to
remember better – the problem is when they come back three weeks later and
you say, you know, how is it going with those memory techniques?, they say
well actually the truth is that we’re not using them, and if you’re not using
them then they’re not going to work.
So the irony is you have to remember to remember. You have to be the kind of
person who’s reminding yourself to put in that extra effort to remember
better. There’s no free lunch, right? These techniques only work if you work
at them, right? You have to make the effort. So that’s always been the rap
against these memory techniques.
Shannon: Okay, so another question that we had from some of our library
patrons was that, if you had had any practical applications for using your
memory techniques?
Joshua Foer: You mean outside of remembering shuffled packs of playing
cards?
Shannon: Correct.
Joshua Foer: But the effect is not – it’s not the most useful skill in real
life, unless you’re spending lots of time in Las Vegas. Yes, you know, it’s
interesting. In my book I actually sort of downplay some of the practical
real world applications of these techniques, but since writing the book and
since publishing it I found a number of ways that they’ve been useful in my
everyday life that I actually kind of hadn’t anticipated or hadn’t really
fully – I guess if I had realized how useful it would be I would have written
about it more.
One of the places where I found these memory techniques to be exceptionally
useful is in delivering speeches, which is not something I had to do before
I, you know, was a published author. Nobody was inviting me to stand up in
front of auditoriums and give speeches. Now they do it sometimes and that of
course is what these techniques were originally invented for in antiquity.
They were invented for oratory and rhetoric.
Cicero, the great Roman speech maker and statesman, was the author of one of
the ancient treatises on how to remember stuff, and this is actually a very
effective way of remembering speeches. And so that’s one practical
application that I hadn’t really anticipated but which I found these
techniques to be sort of surprisingly useful for.
Shannon: So I had read on your website that you’ve been doing some traveling
to schools and I saw on Twitter you communicated with some students. How
have you used these techniques with school groups or have you used them in
different ways when you’re working with children versus when you’re working
with adults?
Joshua Foer: You know it’s interesting, I think one of the really neat
things is just showing kids that, you know, if you take a student and say
look, I’m going to tell you 30 pieces of information and I want you to
remember as much as of it as you possibly can – they’re not going to remember
very much of it.
What’s really cool is you can actually teach them a trick, an ancient trick –
a trick that goes back 2500 years, that people once, you know, used to know
about and used regularly, and teach them that trick, the memory palace, and
immediately go back and retest. I’m going to give you 30 pieces of
information to remember now. And they obviously do a whole lot better. Most
of them can remember all 30 pieces of information, and that’s, you know,
after having just learned how to use this memory technique, and that could be
incredibly empowering for a kid, you know, to all of a sudden realize, whoa!
I actually have a lot more capacity – mental capacity, cognitive capacity
that I may have previously realized. And, you know, I think that could be
very empowering.
Shannon: We had somebody asked if you had – do you use any of these
techniques specifically for learning foreign languages or with foreign
languages?
Joshua Foer: Yes, it’s interesting. That’s a question I get a lot and I
previously would have said: I’m not sure I can see how it can be all that
useful for learning foreign languages. However, I just – I’m actually -I’m
writing an article about this right now for The Guardian in England.
I’ve been doing research in Central Africa in The Congo for what I hope will
be my next book project. And in order to do all this research I needed to
learn the national language of The Congo which is called Lingala, and
there are only a couple of books that teach Lingala: English-Lingala
dictionaries. There are exactly three professors that I could find in the
entire United States of America who offer Lingala courses and they were all,
I think the nearest was like a thousand miles away. So I was in a bit of a
bind because I needed to learn this language.
Now, Ed Cooke who is the main character in my book, he actually started a new
company. It’s a web app called Memrise, and the whole premise of this web app
is taking the techniques that I learned from Ed, these ancient memory
techniques, and using them, applying them to learning foreign languages. And
so it’s doing two things, this app. First of all, encouraging you to come up
with visual mnemonics to help you remember the definitions of foreign words,
and it’s crowdsourcing those mnemonics. So basically somebody else can come
up with a great image to help me remember the meaning of some word in
Lingala, and then I can use that image myself, so that’s one of the
principles behind this software.
And the other principle is what’s known as space learning. So one of the best
demonstrated principles in all of psychology is that if you want to learn a
piece of information, the best way to do it is to learn it, then go away from
it for a while, comeback to it, go away from it for a while, come back to it.
To learn in small chunks, spaced out over time.
And the effects of learning in that manner are really significant. There‘s
been studies that show students who have their learning sessions spaced out,
yes, I think it’s – actually I may get the data wrong. I don’t want to give
you wrong data but the effects are significant and demonstrable. This is
something we’ve known about for decades, in fact practically a century. So
the software uses those two principles, visual mnemonics and space learning
to help you learn foreign language vocabulary.
And the idea is, look, if you could learn, you could memorize the thousand
most commonly used words in a language, in say Lingala, you wouldn’t
necessarily be a fluent Lingala speaker, because language is actually a
pretty complicated thing, but you have a serious leg up, you know, when you
step off the plane in Brazzaville, by knowing the thousand most common words.
And so I tried this, I did it, I used his software.
And 10 weeks using his software, using Memrise, and by golly, I memorized the
– I think it was the 1100 most commonly used words in the Lingala language.
And I got off the plane and I can carry on some pretty basic conversations
with people. I couldn’t – wasn’t able to, you know, talk about philosophy or
anything but I thought it was pretty incredible. We ended up doing the math
on how much time I actually spent learning the thousand most commonly used
words in Lingala. And over the course of 10 weeks, it averages the total
number of hours I spent with this software was 22 hours, and the average in [a]
learning session was four minutes apiece. So what that tells you is if you
can just put in four minutes at a time, right?, and do it, you know,
regularly, and space it out over just 10 weeks, which isn’t that much time,
it is possible to at least master the vocabulary of a foreign language. And I
was frankly actually pretty shocked at how well that worked, I didn’t expect [it]
to work as well as it did. And I’m writing an article about that right now.
Shannon: Okay, and then what did you do with the grammar side of… or is that
a whole different can of worms?
Joshua Foer: Well – there’s no way to memorize the rules of grammar for this
per se, at least that I know of. It turns out Lingala is a pretty – it’s
got pretty straight forward grammar, just because it originated as trade
language and so everything is fairly regular and not that complicated. So I
went and I read a little book on the grammar of Lingala.
Now, I probably sounded like an absolute idiot for most people when I opened
my mouth, but they thought it was pretty cool that, you know, this white guy
from America was speaking Lingala in The Congo. That’s not something they see
every day.
Shannon: Another question that has come up was: have you developed any new
memorization techniques for yourself since the competition?
Joshua Foer: I have not – I mean the truth is, like, the sort of memory
training I was doing for that contest, like, you’re operating in kind of a
high level. In terms of the amount of effort it takes and the sorts of skills
that I was developing were really great for winning a memory contest. But,
like, there aren’t that many opportunities to memorize, you know, a thousand
random numbers in real life.
So it’s a bit like having a, you know, a formula one racer parked in your
garage. Like, it’s kind of cool to know it’s there but you don’t often get a
chance to take that out and put the pedal to the metal. So there hasn’t
really been an incentive for me to try and, you know, take my memorizing to
the next level, because I’m, you know, I’m not really competing anymore in
those contests.
I entered the memory contest as a journalist because I’m curious and I wanted
to know if the techniques really work and how they work. And having won the
contest I really didn’t feel the compulsion to come back and compete the
following year.
Now, while I haven’t been, you know, developing new memory techniques, I can
tell you for a fact that there are a number of people in America, and a whole
lot more in Europe and Asia, who are continuing to push the envelope of what
people can do with their memories. They’re developing through ever more
sophisticated, ever more complicated memory techniques that are, I mean, kind
of mind boggling, the amount of time they’re putting into developing this.
And so I think it’s – you say, why are these people doing this?, this is
crazy. But, you know, the number of hours it takes to become a really amazing
center fielder or, you know, to become a really amazing point guard, takes a
lot of hours and you can just as well ask: what’s the point of spending all
of your time, you know, developing this crazy field of dribbling the ball up
and down the court, right? What is the possible utility of that? But nobody
really says that, or not many people say that.
And I think you have to look at these memory competitions as just – as just
another sort of form of people channeling their innate competitive instincts.
And doing it, you know, in a way that is, like, at first perhaps seems a
little odd but I think actually tells us a lot of how our memories work and
what they’re capable of.
Shannon: We had had another question, similar along those lines about: did
you have any personal or spiritual insights as you trained or prepared for
the competition?
Joshua Foer: I like that question a lot. That’s spiritual insight and that’s
actually not one I’ve ever gotten before.
Shannon: Oh.
Joshua Foer: That’s tough. I would say, personal insight – you know, the
thing that was like a big personal insight for me and is really, frankly,
more than any of the memory stuff, what I hope people will take away from my
book, is the realization that with the right kind of deliberate focused
practice, we are capable, like, anybody is capable of doing something
extraordinary.
I mean, I would have told you before I set out on this path to try and train,
this is just impossible. I could never do this. This is just beyond, sort of,
where I would imagine the limits of my own mind lay.
And yes, what I found out is, with time and effort and sort of going about it
in the right way: that was not true. That the limits were not where I thought
they were. And that, certainly I think, has actually affected sort of more
generally my life; that realization that with effort and time and practice, I
can do things that might otherwise seem really difficult. Like for example
learning, you know, an obscure African language. If you put your mind to it,
it’s possible. And that’s a really powerful thing to, sort of, have rolling
around in the back of your mind I think.
Shannon: When I saw you when you were in Austin at a book signing, you
talked the audience through one of your memory palaces. Could you take us on
a tour?
Joshua Foer: Sure. Well, I’m not sure I remember a memory palace we built in
Austin.
Shannon: At some of your speeches.
Joshua Foer: Oh, okay. Well, I guess I was talking about how – you know, how
to memorize a speech and so that was a memory palace. That was actually one
that I used my own apartment in New Haven Connecticut as a memory palace. And
if you imagine the very front door of my house, I have – well actually, well,
so alright. At the front door of my house there’s an image of a bunch of
nudists, overweight nudists, who are riding their bicycles straight into my
front door. And that image, which I can see very very clearly in my mind’s
eye, helps me remember that the first thing I talk about when I get up on
stage, is this bizarre contest, right?. That the bizarre contest is: people
engaging in a naked bicycle race.
I talked about this bizarre contest that I attended in 2005 as a science
journalist. And I go inside of my house, and there is an image of Cookie
Monster riding on top of Mr. Ed, the talking horse. And that reminds me to
introduce in my speech Ed Cooke: Cookie Monster-Mr. Ed. That reminds me to
introduce Ed Cooke, who is, you know, the main character of my book. And I
have sort of a whole shpiel about him. And then I go into another room in the
house, and there’s actually an image of, I can see it in the living room,
Britney Spears dancing on the coffee table. And that reminds me to tell an
anecdote about Britney Spears. None of these will make any sense to you if
you haven’t heard my speech.
But that just shows you sort of the general principle. You have these images
that represent whatever it is that you’re going to be talking about. And then
as you’re moving through your house or moving through your memory palace,
wherever it is, those images each cue sort of a different topic in this
speech. And that’s actually how the great Roman orators memorized their
speeches. They would have these images that they would put, you know, in an
imaginary space in their mind’s eye, and each image represented a topic.
In fact the Greek word “topos” - the word topic comes from the Greek word
“topos”, which means place. And that’s a vestige of when people used to talk
about oratory and rhetoric in these sorts of spatial terms. The phrase “in
the first place”, like "in the first place," "in the second place" - and
[that's] in the first place of your memory palace. And I thought that was
really fascinating.
Shannon: So you mentioned Ed again, what are some of the other more
memorable characters you’ve met while you were writing this book, or while
you’ve been doing some of your other writings from your other articles?
Joshua Foer: Oh well, in the book there are, you know, a number of really
kind of strange, eccentric folks who I write about. And there’s – a lot of
them are still actually competing in the memory contests. There’s a guy
called Kim Peek who was the basis for Dustin Hoffman’s character in the movie
Rain Man, and I got to spend a day, basically -two days, with Kim Peek.
And that was probably one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life
because he was truly an unusual character. I mean he was – we spent the day,
we spent the afternoon in the Salt Lake City Public Library memorizing
phonebooks. It was a pretty unusual way to spend an afternoon and that tells
you a lot about him and sort of what he did with his time.
Shannon: Are you still in contact with any of the people you write about in
the book?
Joshua Foer: Oh, yeah. Well I talk to Ed quite a lot and, you know, I
periodically track down some of the other people. I hear from them, from
Gunther Karsten, and from Ben Pridmore, from several of the other contestants
in the memory world. I haven’t totally lost track of them. I mean a lot of
them became my friends over the course of my reporting this book. And, you
know, one of the things I really value from this experience is friends that I
meet, and having these people, you know, sort of continue to be part of my
life.
Shannon: Another question that had come up was you talked about a few days
before the competition, stopping your training so that you could clean up
your memory palaces?
Joshua Foer: Yes.
Shannon: What does that all involve, like to clean things – to clean things
out?
Joshua Foer: Really the best way to clean out a memory palace is to simply
figure out a way to avoid thinking about it for as much time as possible,
because memories fade with time – all memories fade with time. And if you
can essentially not revisit that memory palace in your mind’s eye for several
weeks, typically if you give it two or three weeks and you go back and try
and re-remember something in that memory palace, you won’t get serious
interference from the things that you memorized much earlier.
The problem is if you reuse your memory palace, you know, like, the next day,
or worst yet, the same day, you’ll get confused because you’ll have these
images from having used the memory palace earlier, getting in the way.
Sometimes you won’t remember those…the images that you actually want to
remember.
So the best way for cleaning out your memory palace is simply to avoid going
there for as long as possible. And yes, I mean, some of these – some of the
memory contestants talk about, you know, like, going through and actually
scrubbing the walls and opening the windows and I’m not sure if that’s really
sort of metaphorical or whether that’s something they actually really do.
Joshua Foer: Curious to know, how many people are on the call?
Shannon: 23.
Joshua Foer: Oh, great.
Shannon: So, less than what we had RSVP, but we’re still good numbers.
Joshua Foer: That’s great.
Shannon: So when you went in to write the articles for – about the memory
contest, did you have an idea that it was going to turn into a book, or was it
just an article that you were going...
Joshua Foer: It kind of was so – I mean originally I’d shown up just to do
an article, and when I left that competition the first day, the day that I
attended it in 2005, I sort of went like whoa, this is really an incredible
story. Like there is so – I thought that contest was just going to be sort of
like a curiosity, you know, a kind of interesting thing to write a short
article about and move on to the next thing. But when I left after that first
day and I’d had – I watched these people who profess to be totally normal
human beings performing what seems like supernatural feats of memory.
And telling me that they were doing, performing these feats using techniques
that were invented 2500 years ago and that were once widely known and widely
practiced, that basically been sort of forgotten about, I was like, this is
really amazing. And I don’t know that it totally dawned on me that it was
going to turn into a book at that point, but I did for sure know this is
something I wanted to continue to learn about.
And so I ended up going to more memory contests. I went to a memory contest
in Germany, I went to two memory contests in the United Kingdom, and
basically like, sort of getting other – convincing other magazines to let me
go back and basically write the same story I’d written about that initial
project, but to go cover sort of, you know, international contests.
Just because I wanted to learn more about this and to spend more time with
these people and find out how they did it. What definitely was not obvious,
because it couldn’t have possibly been, was that I was going to end up
competing in this contest a year later and ultimately winning it.
That was just sort of a case of, like, I got in over my head. The more I got
-became interested in this subject, the more I started to play around with it
in my spare time. Trying to, you know, improve my own memory techniques and
then I sort of, you know, started to become good at it, because I was
investing a lot of time because I’d become kind of obsessed. And so, you
know, this is a case of, sort of, a small seed being planted, and my not even
totally realizing that the seed has been planted. But it grew obviously into
this tree.
Shannon: Another question we have gotten was: after this experience, were
you able to remember things that you have previously thought you had
forgotten?
Joshua Foer: No, that is not one of the benefits of the kind of memory
training I did, unfortunately. I don’t know – I don’t know how you go about
retrieving lost memories, except perhaps spending a lot of time, sort of,
dwelling on whatever the period of your life you’re trying to remember is.
But I don’t know any real techniques for that.
Shannon: Have you heard anything about any sort of research about like ways
to make you forget, like especially if you’re in like stressful or post
traumatic stress kind of situation?
Joshua Foer: You know, I actually – an article came across my Twitterfeed
today, which I have to confess I have open right now on my screen but haven’t
read yet. And it’s actually strange. It was published in NPR’s Morning
Edition, I think today, about “Can we learn to forget our memories.” And a
researcher at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland who seems to think
there are techniques for doing so. But I can’t tell you too much more about
that right now because I haven’t looked into this.
Shannon: Where is the article?
Joshua Foer: It was on NPR, I think was actually on yesterday’s edition –
Morning Edition.
Shannon: Okay.
Joshua Foer: The morning NPR show.
Shannon: We’ll find it. So you were talking about the associative hooks. Do
you know any that specifically draw on smells as hooks?
Joshua Foer: Yes, and you know, smells are terrific cues for memory, right?
In -Marcel Proust was right when talking about when the madeleine can
immediately draw you back to childhood. And it’s something that I think we
all kind of know, because we have it happen to us, where you catch a whiff of
something and all of a sudden you’re someplace else in your memory.
And part of the reason, it’s been suggested, that scent is so evocative from
a – in terms of memory, is that the olfactory bulb, if you look at the actual
circuitry of the brain, is connected straight into the -some of the key
structures involved in memory. And so, unlike our other senses, which are
sort of first interpreted through – or that undergo more assertive
interpretation before they’re sort of in the hippocampus, smell is just like
plugged right in.
And part of what that, sort of, what that suggests is an explanation for why,
you know, sort of all writing about food, all writing about wine, sort of
vaguely seems like B.S. if you know what I mean. Like, people write about
trying to describe a scent and trying to describe a taste. We don’t really
have the words for it in the same way that we have the words to describe a
visual sensation, or even a tactile sensation -we can usually come up with
some pretty good words for it. Certainly a sound, we can describe a sound.
We’re not very good at describing scents and flavors because the linguistic
areas of our brain are basically bypassed by the circuitry that comes into
the olfactory bulb. It’s a function of how our brains are built that we’re
so bad at talking about and writing about food and smell.
Shannon: So have you come across any down side to doing the memory training?
Joshua Foer: You know, to do it at the level I was doing it, takes a lot of
time. And that -you know, it’s not like I, you know, suddenly became
obsessive compulsive or, you know, felt like I was the – I don’t know. The
downside is the time it takes just to become really good at this. And, you
know, that’s time that can be spent doing other things and I’m not entirely
convinced that that’s the way to spend one’s time. But you know, it is
something that appealed to me and I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it for
everyone, but you know, I enjoyed spending my time doing memory training.
Shannon: And one more question. What are some current – besides the book
that you’re working on about Central Africa, what are some other projects
that you’ve been working on recently? I read about the Atlas Obscura.
Joshua Foer: Oh, Atlas Obscura, yes. Atlas Obscura is an online guide to the
world’s wonders and curiosities that I co-founded, and the idea that you’re
traveling to some place and you want to know where’s all the really
wonderful, weird, curios stuff that, you know, I might not otherwise find in
the Lonely Planet or in some other guide books.
This website, atlasobscura.com is where you’ll find it. And so we’ve been
sort of taking people’s tips from all over the world. You know, there’s a
crazy weird little museum down the street that I know about, or there’s this
amazing, you know, natural rock formation that is totally bizarre. And people
submit these tips and we’ve been collecting them. And we’re actually working
now on editing, me and my co-partner in the Atlas Obscura project, we’re
editing a book that will be sort of, we hope, the definitive guide to the
world’s wonders and curiosities. And it should be out some time possibly by
next Christmas, but more likely early in 2014 some time. So please keep your
eyes open to that because I think it’s going to be a really fun book.
Shannon: So you’re in an architecture project as well?
Joshua Foer: Yes, I organized – I co-organized a – with a friend, a design
competition called Sukkah City in New York City. And we had 600 architects
from around the world compete to re-imagine this ancient Jewish ritual
structure called the Sukkah. Here in the Old Testament there were these
temporary huts the Israelites supposedly dwelled in when they were in Egypt,
and traditional Jews who build them in their backyards for one week each
summer, each fall actually, to commemorate the Exodus from Egypt. It’s one of
the major Jewish holidays along with, you know, Passover and Rosh Hashanah
and Yom Kippur.
And so we basically invited all these architects to try and re-imagine what
one of these huts could look like. And it was, you know, really neat because
it was a competition that’s open to everybody, not just Jewish architects.
And so we had architects from countries all over the world, 47 countries,
among them 12 were selected as winners. And those 12 were built in Union
Square Park in New York City, in one of the most sort of public populated
spaces in New York City.
And among the 12 winners we had – and it’s interesting, we had a Muslim
architect, a Baha’i architect, a bunch of architects of various Christian
denominations, and only one Jewish architect among the 12 who won the
competition. And it was really amusing, a little village of temporary huts.
It all looked kind of like a tour from outer space right in the middle of
Union Square Park in New York City. And that holiday is coming up in just a
month, and so I build a Sukkah in my own backyard, and I’m going to be doing
that in a couple of weeks.
Shannon: We’re going to go ahead and open up the phone lines and if anyone
has – if – so that that we can say thank you and just kind of say that we
appreciate that you’ve been here with us this evening.
Joshua Foer: Well thank you, I really appreciate having this opportunity -
this has been a neat experience, and it’s the first time I’ve ever done
anything quite like this. And so I hope that all the folks on the other end
of the line haven’t been rolling their eyes or dozing off but –
Shannon: We’ll find out.
Joshua Foer: And thank you for giving me this opportunity.
Shannon: We appreciate it.
PATRON DIALOGUE EDITED OUT.
STATE OF TEXAS - TSL - TALKING BOOK PROGRAM
Moderator: Talking Book Program
09-04-12/7:00 Pm CT
Confirmation # 77112404
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